(Headline USA) Home Depot could be the next company to face a conservative boycott after a report this week revealed it partnered with a LGBT group to develop a curriculum that taught elementary students about gender identity and sexuality.
In 2022, Home Depot announced it would be working with the Human Rights Campaign to support the activist group’s “Welcoming Schools” program. The program offers LGBT curricular options, including K-12 lesson plans that feature inappropriate content on “pansexual” and “nonbinary” identities, according to Fox Business.
One lesson plan supplied by the “Welcoming Schools” program has kindergarten to second grade students read a book titled Red: A Crayon’s Story, which teaches children about variant gender identities. The teacher is then instructed to help students explore their own identities.
“Each student will create a crayon about themselves that explores their inner identities,” the lesson plan states. “It is important to teach young children that we cannot assume someone’s gender identity based upon their gender expression.”
Another lesson plan for third through fifth graders, titled “Social Justice Acrostic Poems,” has students write poems about various social justice movements, including Black Lives Matter, respect all languages, animal rights, climate change, migration is beautiful, gay rights, women’s rights, water is life, disability rights, gun control or March for Our Lives.
In a statement, Home Depot denied HRC’s ulterior objective to indoctrinate students, claiming the “Welcoming Schools” program merely “focuses on preventing and ending bullying, which is often targeted at LGBTQ students.”
Kelie Charles, Home Depot’s senior director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, added, “We are dedicated to intensifying our efforts to make a meaningful, sustainable difference in supporting change in our communities.”
A number of companies that cater to red-leaning constituencies have faced boycotts in recent months for embracing leftist policies. Just this month, Lowe’s—a direct competitor of Home Depot’s—agreed to ditch its woke DEI policies after pushback.
“Our movement against wokeness is a force that companies simply cannot ignore,” independent journalist and activist Robby Starbuck said in a statement afterward. “I’m a megaphone for normal people who are sick of having divisive social issues shoved down their throat at work.”
Home Depot’s co-founder and first CEO, Bernard Marcus has been known as a generous and outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump, although the 95-year-old has been retired from company operations since 2002.
The company came under fire previously after it was busted pushing controversial ideas derived from “critical race theory”—including that of an innate privilege for whites, males and Christians—in its training seminars.
The scandal broke just weeks after current CEO Ted Decker assumed control of the company, following the retirement of his former boss, Craig Menear, in March 2022.
